Installing MediaWiki

For another little skunkworks effort at work, I’m trying to install MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia. Everything seems to work, right up to the point where the installation script attempts to create and populate the database for the application to run from. At this point, it silently fails. No database, no LocalConfig.php being created.

On first glance, it appears like a classic *nix permissions issue, except that I’ve chmoded the appropriate directory to 777. Then, in desperation, everything above it, which is demonstrably dumb. Still no joy. Same symptoms.

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One Reply to “Installing MediaWiki”

For those reading this post without MediaWiki experience– you should probably slam your hand in the door a few times to get an idea of the pain involved to try and install this beast.

I’d like to think I’m fairly decent with FreeBSD (I’ve been using it for close to 10 years now), and I eventually gave-up on getting MediaWiki installed and working. Granted it was something I was trying to do in my “spare time” at work, but I found the time to install it to not be worth it to me. If the install process was that impossible, I didn’t want to find-out what it was like to upgrade. Anyhow, I digress…

Stephen– The first thing I’d do is check httpd-error.log as well as the messages log (/var/log/httpd-error.log and /var/log/messages on FreeBSD, respectively). Not sure where those are at on OSX, though. Those should at least give you an error message as to what is happening (as long as error logging is enabled in your Apache config). Most likely it will be in httpd-error.log, but when processes crash they also leave a trace in messages sometimes. Granted I don’t know OSX, so this may not be useful.